How do we 'get back to normal' after someone dies?
A missive from the frontline of (messily) figuring it out
The cat is judging me. Looking at me intently from three feet away. I can feel his moonlight-blue eyes bearing down on my third glass of wine. I’m up late. Attempting to form some thoughts that aren’t about whether there’s an after school club that also does bedtime and washes between their toes. Ahem.
This ink black time of night feels like silk. Precious, spun precariously between my two children’s bedtimes and my own nightly demise. Depending how drawn-out bedtime is, (or how much of my day job has bled into the evening), I’ll sneak one, maybe two hours where thoughts are entirely my own. It’s a magic time and thoughts meander and connect without rice cake-shaped interruption. Who knew that true luxury was forming a full sentence in ones head.
“You can do literally anything” my son, now seven, told me wide eyed as I stroked his forehead down to sleep just earlier. He is awed by the freedom of adulthood, intrigued as to why we do not eat ice cream for breakfast or watch wrestling matches on TV all day.
I will his philosophy to rub off on me. But instead sit dumbfounded by this newfound silky time and space. So of course, like all adults with the freedom of the world at their fingertips, I pick up my phone and scroll aimlessly on Instagram:
A meme posted by someone I don’t know reads: “You can’t look at the sun, or death, for too long”.
I turn my phone over and look up at the moon with the reverie of someone high on gin and think – where are we when a data harvesting platform says what I’ve been searching to say unsuccessfully for weeks?
It’s only been three months since my most recent loss. I’m a veritable grief fresher by anyone’s standards. But I definitely feel it. That familiar wrestle. The push and pull, between the certainty of standing close to death and the uncertainty of what comes next.
I know that soon I’ll need to begin extracting myself from the land of the dying and wade through swampy waters back to the living. Or at least find a way to have the one ankle simultaneously in each camp with neither one holding the other back.
I have lived through the very worst of times – my dying dad and I alone with only morphine and bees as light relief. Death is not always like they show it in they movies, where loved ones slip away on an exhale. It’s often violent, too. Anyone who has lost someone they love can tell you of their many horrors. Mine are far from unique. So why, I wonder, why is my shoe still stuck on that hospital lino? Why do I keep returning to the epicentre of pain, when I’m now so very free to leave?
Firstly, it’s hard leaving a place your body is still rooted to. Every time I close my eyes, I’m back there in that bloody room, with his jaw clenching and fixing like a figure in a horror movie. (Everything feels like a movie these days. Until it’s real).
No amount of intellectual (or inane domestic) thinking – “come on brain, let’s ponder bedspreads for the spare room”, can free your body from a state of shock. I won’t go into the science, because whole books have been written by people far more qualified than me, but suffice to say, The Body Keeps The Score.
“I never want anyone to see what I’ve seen”, I say to anyone who is brave enough to ask about the things I saw. But is that entirely true? Because (and buckle up, as this may come as surprise to anyone yet versed in living close to death) I’ve never felt so alive on a diet of Hula Hoops and scolding canteen tea than I did back then. I’ve never felt so at home in my body as when I saw his soul scrambling to stay in his. Is it fair to say it was relentlessly awful? If I’m searingly honest. No. Because I drove home each night with my skin tingling with absolute aliveness. People take narcotics for that.
I worry I might never be the same now I’ve peered (not once, but twice) into the abyss. I wonder if I can ever care about breakfast meetings or whether I ought to get profhilo now I’ve sold a soul onwards.
I want nothing more than my mind to tang on vanilla stuff like soft furnishings and batch cooking for the kids. But equally I’m shoving down a growing urge to roar into the wind and harass strangers by their shoulders yelling that we are all going to die, and why the jeffing hell are none of us talking about it?
I desperately want people to understand this full exquisite grief.
I pour another glass of wine and pick up my phone. Instagram again. A friend posts a picture of herself on holiday; a cove, rugged and blue, her leg cocked in a bikini at the centre of the frame. It makes me smirk with indifference. Sure, you’re posting from the beach, I mock. I’ve seen another dimension. I throw my phone down at the absolute douchebaggery of life.
I miss being cosseted by the hospital. By the certainty that death is the dead end of the hospital corridor I’m walking down. I miss the loveliness of all that cold hard knowing. I miss the nurses’ checks, the blinkering away of normal life. I miss being held by the horror and monotony of it all, the shit stains, and the monitors. The tight sheets. The catheters collecting rhythmic piss. The circularity of shifts. The stagnant air that holds you like a hug. Stifling you. Suffocating all your fear away, (almost). I miss the rogue hope it might all be ok. The simplicity of focusing only on one thing.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. But if you’re still here, then take a single note: Death is the most life affirming thing you’ll ever encounter, equal only to birth. That moment where the membrane is so thin that we find ourselves pressing up against it, shins teetering precariously between the living and whatever lies beyond. A friction point so magnetic you’re repelled and pulled back simultaneously.
Time passes, and I suppose eventually a choice must be made. Do we stay in the magic and madness of the passing place, or do we salute our precious death and tread nervously but with conviction back into the land of indifference – to commuting, Pret coffees, small talk; to living?
The cat narrows his moonlight blue eyes and lunges – swatting his paw just beyond my seat. I whip around to find a squash of spider between his claws. No one is judging how long or short we (I) stay in the grief space; least of all a cat.
💕